Google's promise for Android that never comes true

By contrast, Google’s update process isn’t as smooth with the Android ecosystem , which only pushes updates directly to its own products, like the Pixel family phones, and even these sometimes fail to get updates from Google. timely manner.

Manufacturers like Samsung, Xiaomi, OPPO, and everyone else have to get the update from Google, work on it, optimize it for your device, and then push it out. In many cases, it must also go through the carriers, making brand promises of faster updates and older devices fall on deaf ears, time and time again.

Too many promises…

Since time immemorial, Google has been struggling first with fragmentation and now with the implementation of Android updates by different manufacturers, who do not finish making it as easy and fast as possible for their devices to update.

The last of these attempts, and perhaps the most ambitious, is the one that will force manufacturers to adopt A/B updates, that is, those that can be installed in a secondary partition in a completely transparent way for the user to activate. automatically once the terminal is rebooted, simply by changing the active partition. However, and although Google wants to make this process mandatory, there are many manufacturers that do not want to work in this way , demonstrating once again that the fragmentation of Android is the big problem of the American giant when it comes to equating itself with iOS and its punctual updates.

Mishaal Rahman

@MishaalRahman

Google is working on making OTA updates faster. A new set of patches has been submitted to AOSP that speed up OTAs on devices that use the virtual A/B with compression update mechanism. Combined, these improvements bring a full OTA install time from ~23 minutes to ~13 minutes! https://t.co/2hDliWzUZZ

November 30, 2022 • 19:54

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The hated fragmentation of Android

The problem here is obvious; Not all manufacturers are equally consistent with OS updates , and some versions of Android running on devices can be so modified that updates just don’t make sense. This is one of the reasons why, at the gates of Android 14, even today the majority of phones that work with Google software are still anchored in Android 11, a version that is almost three years old.

While it seems manufacturers are to blame if your phone is still running an old version of Android, other factors are also at play, such as carriers’ insistence on customizing phones . When you buy a terminal from a telephone company, there are certain peculiarities in the software, such as no boot animation, or the presence of certain bloatware that personalizes the experience. This also has to be developed for each type of device and it is something that keeps delaying the arrival of updates to our phones.

Are Android updates really worse than iOS updates?

All of this is not to say that Android updates are horrible compared to iOS updates, either . Both have their own challenges and limitations.

Android is an open operating system, which means that it is used on a wide variety of devices from different manufacturers, each with different configurations and technical specifications. Hence the much feared fragmentation that makes new versions of the operating system arrive so late on the hundreds of different devices where they are expected. In addition, this makes it more difficult to ensure a consistent experience that is compatible with all phones equally.

On the other hand, iOS is only compatible with Apple devices, making it easier for the company to ensure a consistent and compatible experience across all of its devices.

However, this does not mean that Android updates are necessarily worse than iOS updates . Both have their strengths and weaknesses. For example, Android updates offer more customization options and tend to reach a larger number of devices, while iOS has a more rigorous focus on privacy and security and reaches all compatible phones at the same time.